Books published by Shearsman Books

In Unbelievers, John Mateer seeks out evidence of the importance of the Islamic and Arabic history in places as diverse as Dubai, Seville, Cairo and the Portuguese village of Monsanto. He is not only interested in the past but in the deep present, its poetics.

1st Sergeant Arthur "Bud" Locke was based at Clark Field in the Philippines, as part of the USAAF's Far East Air Service Command, in 1941. He was taken prisoner with many others in the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, experienced the Bataan Death March, and was transported to a POW work-camp in Kobe, from which he was liberated in 1945.

Archilochus, Greece's first lyric poet, took part in the earliest colonial expeditions. Perril's Archilochus has been sent into exile to colonise the moon, that curator of lost objects and desires. This collection voices the ageing poet's dissection of hope and desire, and his meditation upon the body that barely houses them.

Anthony Mellors' first collection in some years brings together a number of sequences, including the remarkable 'bent out of shape' and 'The Gordon Brown Sonnets', the latter extensively and puckishly annotated.

Sean Burn's third full-length poetry collection ranges across art and sculpture, a Tuvan singer, man's impact on the Lake District, the disgrace of water privatisation, dance, America and Europe, and finishes with the title poem which is an intense transgender love story.

Thin Ice takes the reader on an odyssey of the imagination, with poems whose sources range from a childhood in Maine, to NYC of the Vietnam era, to our paranoid post-9/11 world. There is a measure of relief in the quotidian pleasures of our beleaguered natural environment, whether from a terrace on a Greek island, or the poet's garden in Cornwall.

The Sun-Artist is a collection of "pattern poems" by a poet who has been experimenting with visual texts - often with a uniquely Irish "subject matter" - for several years. Her last Shearsman collection, Forest Music, featured a number of such works, but this chapbook is entirely visual.

Anibal Nunez has been described as the best Spanish poet of his generation, sometimes called the generation of '68. His recognition has been a long time coming, no doubt due to the fact that he stood outside the accepted currents of his time. Poet, painter, essayist and translator, he died young, but left behind a very large body of work.

The Lower Reaches is framed within precise geography, the Lower Hope region of the Thames estuary where the author was born and grew up beside a river on which "the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire" floated.

A collection of poems that will surprise the reader: Suffolk natives, incomers and visitors are all represented. From Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey via George Crabbe to Michael Hamburger and R.F. Langley, both the range and the quality of the work selected will excite the reader.

The poems in this chapbook form an individual sequence. At the same time, they present a new and longer section of an ongoing series. The Sea Quells responds to and continues Collecting Shells, which was published in 2011 with Oystercatcher Press and is included, in excerpt form, in the anthologies Sea Pie and Dear World and Everyone in It.

"Via encounters with the troubadour poet Guillaume of Poitiers, Holderlin and the goldsmith Jivan Astfalck, Farrell offers 'new solutions / new songs,' whilst 'provoking new lines of thought.' This work might make us feel 'hardly more than poets and not who we really are' but who cares when 'tongue play makes sense like this'?" - Scott Thurston

The Croatian poet Augustin (Tin) Ujevic (1891-1955) is one of the finest Southern Slav lyric poets and one of the great poets of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. While Tin Ujevic's poems are hardly known in English, they are loved in his native Croatia and throughout former Yugoslavia.

Imagems 1 contains six statements by a European poet who challenges modernism and post-modernism alike and extends (beyond) both. Richard Berengarten takes as his twin cues a statement by Octavio Paz, "For the first time in our history we are contemporaries of all humanity", and a short poem by George Seferis.

Reflections on the individual and community flash in this urban web of buildings, technology and news bits, where the "city" looms and the inhabitants submit. Bits and pieces of Abu Ghraib, the Iraq war and 9/11 will be recognized, along with 24/7 newscasters and U.S. political figures welded together as one gigantic talking head.

A personal story caught up in the dark history of the mid-twentieth century begins with a lost child's cry. A dozen years of sheltered life in a Hungarian middle-class family - a vanished age of peace and luxury behind precariously concealed Jewish origins - is wrenched into persecution by the Nazi invasion of March 1944.

A book-length poem that caused great consternation when it first appeared, in 1840, Sordello became a byword for poetic difficulty, both because of its subject-matter and also Browning's verse style. His language is here impacted, twisting and turning like the narrative. Sordello is a crucial work in Browning's development.

"Rosa Alcala is uncompromising, wry, and brutal: all of the qualities that significant poetic works of cultural criticism require." - Carmen Gimenez Smith

If Sordello is a book-length poem, then The Ring and the Book - in its day regarded as Browning's greatest achievement, but today seemingly out of fashion - is something different. It is in fact a great novel, but one presented in blank verse, almost 21,000 lines of it, and in twelve books, each representing a different view of the action.

The title of Looms signifies the weaving tool as well as the shadowing appearance of something, These "woven tales" were inspired by Barbara Guest's statement that a tale "doesn't tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about."

And here, where forest entrails spill into winter light, you find me, straying out from the forest's dark memory - Itinerant Hebrew poet David Vogel, Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne and surveyor David Thompson are among the lost voices re-presenced in George Messo's enigmatic new book, Violades & Appledown.

At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria is an anthology of eighteen Bulgarian poets writing and publishing from the middle of the twentieth century to today. Rather than being a collection of emblematic poems, it is a thematic book which reflects the styles of contemporary Bulgarian poetry.

Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. This festschrift volume is published to coincide with his 80th birthday and features tributes from friends, colleagues and fellow poets and translators.

This volume brings together a number of hard-to-find reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a central figure in the interaction between American and British poetry in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and also publisher of the excellent small press, Migrant. Shearsman published his Collected Poems in 2006.

This large volume brings together under one set of covers the three volumes published by Shearsman in 2005 and 2007: The Black Heralds and Other Early Poems, Trilce and The Complete Later Poems. Some minor errors have been corrected and one additional poem - recently rediscovered - has been added to the Early Poems section.

Steve Spence's new collection of poetry is a continuation of the mapping of contemporary cultural and political topics through the medium of montage, intervention and startling juxtaposition. While this poetry has its serious side there is plenty of scope for fun and a celebration of the strange and 'off-key'.

These essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.

The China Shop Pictures ranges widely in time, space and subject matter, encompassing Jacobite wine glasses, pedagogical horses, a Japanese invention for walking on water, and a medley of viewpoints both famous and anonymous - from Virgil and Gerard de Nerval to a woman who's in love with 'the monkey they left on the moon'.

Oystercatcher Press has published over 50 pamphlets of contemporary poetry in its short existence. It won the inaugural Michael Marks Award 'for outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form'. Chair of judges Ian McMillan praised the press for 'taking risks with older and newer writers from outside the perceived centre of British poetry'.